You mentioned Carol's background never being mentioned. So what do you think her family dynamic was. Do you think she had siblings? Was she raised in a divorced family? Thinks like that.
I have so much to say 🙈 but I’ll confine this post to the three verbal references to Carol’s family in the flagship show. They’re all from Angela Kang’s run and will give us a idea of the discussion inside her writers’ room and the direction they were taking Carol in.
Everything has to serve a purpose:
There’s a need for word economy in screenwriting because a lot of different elements have to fit into a one-hour episode, especially so on an action heavy show. All dialogue has to service the story/character arcs. Cutting for time messes with continuity, pacing and the build of narrative tension, so the writers choose the characters’ words with purpose.
Because the camera is an observer—the audience isn’t inside the protagonist’s head, like in a novel—word choice and phrasing become very important. How a character says something matters. The director and actors will base their interpretation on it, so there’s no such thing as a throwaway line in a script.
Let’s look at the dialogue which introduces Carol’s parents and her grandmother to the viewers:
CAROL’S GRANDMA “Find Me” (1018)
What’s significant in this beat?
Carol’s grandmother had a sewing machine that she put to good use, which tells us that she was practical, handy and self-sufficient. Like Carol.
She made Carol’s clothes, so the family didn’t have much money. The line also implies that she was heavily involved in Carol’s upbringing. It could’ve been a multi-generational household, but she could equally well have been her granddaughter’s primary caregiver.
Having Carol help her and the way in which she did so tells the audience that the two had a good relationship. She enjoyed Carol’s company, she was teaching her things in a playful way and she focused on positive reinforcement in order to get her grandchild to follow directions.
Key takeaway: she might very well be the reason for Carol’s resilience and capacity to love.
CAROL’S MOTHER “New Haunts” (1110)
This line is really interesting. Why does she say “always”? If her mother actively raised her to pay attention to details, Carol would’ve just said, “my mother taught me...” The line implies that it was her mother’s behavior in general that showed Carol the value of being alert. There are two primary ways in which that could be viewed: either Carol’s mother had bad things happen to her because she wasn’t ‘observant,’ or she was unkind to Carol when she wasn’t perceptive enough for her mother’s liking.
It's quite possible that Carol’s dad used to beat her mom. The context of the scene with this line is about making a man’s life easier, but the phrasing does suggest that Carol herself might’ve been verbally or physically abused by her mother. They’re not mutually exclusive possibilities, but they both raise an interesting similarity between Carol and Daryl. Did she see him so clearly, right from the start, because she too had been an unwanted, inconvenient child? We don’t know what Carol's relationship to domestic violence was prior to Ed or how dysfunctional her home environment was.
CAROL’S FATHER “Trust” (1115)
Generally, a woman who enjoys a close relationship with her father, will not refer to him as her “old man.” Especially not if she’s from the Deep South. He’ll be ‘dad’ or ‘daddy’ to her if they had a loving relationship (like Maggie and Beth with Hershel) or more neutrally, when mentioned to a third party, ‘my father.’ “My old man” implies emotional distance, especially with how it’s paired here with a negative assessment. In what context would he have said this? It’s habitual (used to) and Carol’s delivery suggests she’s been the one on the receiving end of that piece of parental ‘wisdom.’ (Compare it to how her grandmother managed her when she was a child.)
It's likely that her father’s life experiences had made him pessimistic. Carol’s parents were young during an era of enormous social change and uncertainty. Depending on his age and exact circumstances, he could even have been subjected to the draft and have served in Vietnam.
In my opinion, it’s relatively safe to say that her parents didn’t have a positive influence on Carol. If a child is constantly told that she shouldn’t have any expectations for a happy outcome and if she has to remain hyper vigilant to protect herself, emotionally or physically, it teaches her that she’s unworthy of consideration or emotional support. Carol’s low self-esteem had its origin long before Ed showed up to make her life worse.
I have a few different scenarios in mind for Carol’s early family dynamics, which could provide some interesting storylines to explore for the character. But to answer your specific questions, I think Carol was an only child for a number of reasons (which I won’t get into here because of the length of this post) and while I don’t think her parents were divorced, it’s possible that they were never married in the first place. (That would also open up the potential for some very intriguing story choices, while shading what we already know about Carol's intimate relationships.) I’d say theirs wasn’t a happy marriage and like Lydia and Sophia (and Daryl!), Carol didn’t have a happy childhood.